Tag: social commentary

What It Really Means to Be a True Friend

“Having a true friend is hard to come by and it’s important to get better at distinguish who is a ‘true’ or ‘real’ friend and who should deserve that kind of title in your mind.”

People tend to throw the word ‘friend’ around a lot especially when you may be desperate or wanting to have a new ‘friend’ come into your life. It is natural to want to build rapport with someone and to do so quickly. It is good to have someone want to spend time with you and get to know you are. When you are short on friends or when friends you know have moved on to a different town, city, or country, you want to work on replacing those lost or far away friendships that you used to have.

Especially as you get older, friends move away, get married, have children, and it can be hard to keep those friendships the same or keep them alive in a meaningful away. Having a true friend is hard to come by and it’s important to get better at distinguish who is a ‘true’ or ‘real’ friend and who should deserve that kind of title in your mind.

Unless the bonds you have are broken or ruptured due to any kind of factor, which does happen in life, you will still have your friends to pick up the connection again despite factor of distance or life circumstances. A friendship that has been established for years or decades doesn’t ever fully go away but you both must work to keep in touch to keep the flame alive into the future. Friendships do fade away, and you or the other person may not be getting what you need to keep it going. It can be sad to let go of a friendship especially when you invest the time, the emotions, and the money spent to keep it alive, but that is just part of life.

We have a tendency in American culture to form friendships at a dizzying pace or want to have someone as a friend quickly to ensure our own need for popularity or for social status. Other cultures tend to be slower in establishing those tight social connections or friendships, but once you do, you have a friend for life, or you have a true friend under a separate kind of category that should be reserved for a few friends and not for many connections or acquaintances.

Yes, we do throw around the word ‘friend’ a lot and too quickly. However, you should be wary of entrusting people who you consider ‘friends’ without feeling out how much that friendship entails. When I think of the meaning of a ‘true friend’, it is deeper than getting drinks every now and then or meeting up to play a sport or do an activity, it is someone who you can share both the good and the bad in your life and they can do the same with you. You don’t have to reveal your whole life story or be exhaustive about it, but a true friend is someone for whom you can be vulnerable with. A true friend won’t judge you for looking for their help, advice, or let you vent to them every now and then.

There are also several kind and thoughtful gestures a friend would do for you whereas an acquaintance or social connection would not. When you need to move and you’re free to lend a helping hand with the furniture, that is a true friend in action. If you need a ride to and from the airport and they don’t mind it even when it’s a little out of the way, that is a true friend. If you need a place to sleep or ‘crash’, and you would rather not splurge for a hotel room, a true friend will offer you their coach or a spare bedroom.

Now, there are two sides to any friendship so keep in mind that if they are willing to do that for you, you should try to do the same for them if the need arises. It is not being transactional but it’s remembering that any true friendship needs effort from both people, and it is good to look out for another especially in an increasingly isolated and technologically driven world. Our phone or our computer or our AI chat tool will never be a replacement for a true friend who is a real person, one whom you can share stories with, help each other with advice, and lend a hand to you when you are in need. Now, you can still drink, eat, play sports, or hang out with a ‘friend’, but if that friend isn’t someone who you can confide in, discuss life and its happenings, or be there for each other, it’s not a deep friendship or can be a bit shallow.

True friendships in my view take years or even decades to foster so while it’s good to try to make new friends, don’t neglect the older friendships you have that can be revived or don’t be too quick to trust someone without giving the friendship time to bloom and see if you both are compatible in the long-run. I would rather have five ‘true friends’ than a hundred or more ‘friends’ who don’t really know me, care about me, or for whom we are close enough to help each other out or just look out for each other.

Friendships are like relationships, though platonic in nature, they are just as important to foster in a healthy manner and that both people are contributing to it. You can start off just as acquaintances but if you’re putting in the time, trying on each side, and growing deeper as friends over the months and years, instead of staying in the shallow subjects, you really are building the ‘true friendships’ that survive time, distance, and other challenges.

Even if you’re married, or have children, or are busy at work, you also need friends and healthy friendships so keep trying to create them, build them, and be a good friend to others in your life. Remember to have quality friendships over the quantity of them as having a few friends for life is much better than have 100 friends who will drop you in a few months because you couldn’t keep up with their lifestyle or their demands or their ‘image.’ True friendship is missing someone when they’re gone and looking forward to the day when you can rekindle the friendship anew.

Stop Romanticizing Stories of Overcoming Adversity Due to Societal Dysfunction

“We all should be striving to succeed but if you find yourself cheering for a success story that could have been avoided in the first place had there been a stable safety net and to have prevented the problem from arising in the first place, that is where more of our attention should be focused on as people.”

Look, I love a feel-good story as much as the next guy. I like it when someone can pull themselves out of poverty or difficult circumstances to achieve wild success for themselves and their next of kin. This is the kind of positive story that is often reported on in American media and popular culture. We love the story of the underdog rising above challenges to achieve something great. It seems to be practically embedded in our national DNA. However, the Achilles heel that we often refuse to acknowledge or focus on as a nation is how dysfunctional it can be to rise above a broken or fractured safety net to escape poverty, homelessness, or even medical debt. We all should be striving to succeed but if you find yourself cheering for a success story that could have been avoided in the first place had there been a stable safety net and to have prevented the problem from arising in the first place, that is where more of our attention should be focused on as people.

 I bring this issue up as this has been the kind of a ‘feel-good yet kind of messed up’ story that garners sympathy and appreciation from the average person throughout my life. For example, I was watching a nationally televised baseball game recently as I like to do sometimes and heard the television commentators for this game focus on the rags-to-riches story of one of the players on the field who has become wildly successful after going through tough times that involved both him and his family.

The baseball player in question had a newborn son arrive around the time of the COVID pandemic’s outbreak, who suffered from a series of seizures, which required a lengthy hospital stay and weekly checkups from the doctors there. The player himself could not play baseball due to cancellation of the MLB season at the time in 2020 and lost his health insurance at the same time his newborn son’s seizures started occurring. Because health insurance is tied to employment in America, the baseball player lost his health insurance at the worst possible time. They did not have enough money left over for housing after paying out of pocket costs for the medical care for their son. As a result, the baseball player and his family were rendered homeless for a while, living out of their family car in a Wal-Mart parking lot at one point in central Florida.

Luckily, even in this case of the dysfunctional health care system failing both this player and his family, having been left in the dust for a while, professional baseball, being the national pastime resumed a few months later in 2020, the baseball player regained his medical insurance and was able to pay off the medical debt due to his success in Major League Baseball over the past few years. I admire this player and his family’s resilience in the face of adversity and am glad his son is doing well now. The player is now a naturalized U.S. citizen also and visits children’s hospitals in the area where he plays to support families going through similar ordeals.

While this story in America had a happy ending after much sadness and anxiety for the family in question, I can’t help but think of the TV commentators’ from this baseball game’s lack of awareness about the societal dysfunction that leads to a whole family living out of their car in a Wal-Mart in central Florida with no safety net to speak of because one of them lost their job, through absolutely no fault of their own, which was tied to their health insurance coverage. It bothered me a great deal personally to not hear from the TV commentary to not mention at all the lack of universal health care in this country or the fact that you can incur thousands of dollars or more of medical debt so a son or daughter can get the treatments or surgeries needed to overcome seizures or other major medical issues.

While this story had a happy ending due to the player’s evolving skillset and MLB’s massive popularity, there are millions of Americans suffering out there currently due to a lack of a durable safety net to fill in the gaps in health and education. Come back stories to break through adversity are great and make for nice commentary but not everyone has had such luck and success navigating the American health care system.

Whether it’s GoFundMe or another online platform, many families have to rely on the kindness of strangers to help them pay down massive medical, educational, or other debt, which is never an enviable position to be in. We should not have to rely on complete strangers to fund necessary medical procedures or to get life-saving medications paid for in the United States. No one should have to forgo their home or apartment to go homeless to pay for medical bills either and be forced to live with their family in a car or on the street. I’m all for people striving to make the best of their abilities in their chosen profession but layoffs, firings, or other unfortunate events can happen leaving us jobless and without health insurance directly as a result.

I’m not going to discuss which kind of system to have regarding how insurance or how higher education can run in America but I do know that you shouldn’t have to rely on having a job at all times to get affordable health care and if you don’t have insurance when a procedure is needed, you should never go bankrupt trying to pay off your medical bills. We can argue forever about the size, scope, and scale of how a universal health care system can support the country while everybody pays their fair share into its functionality, but we should never reach the point where a platform like GoFundMe is needed to fill in the gap when it comes to someone’s health care coverage. The point of this article is not to discuss how such a new system would work or how it can be implemented but rather to address how this current dysfunctional system (or lack thereof) has been allowed to fester and continue without any solutions or improvements recently.

Lastly, feel-good stories are a good way for average people to relate to one another regardless of if you’re a professional baseball player or a janitor, but we should be taking the right lessons from these stories. We should be applauding the person and family’s resilience and their success in navigating the massive challenge, but we should also question on how we could let such dysfunction run a key part of our society or how we can allow this system to continue given that it bankrupts average people because they lost their job through no fault of their own.

Sometimes, in life, you must ask hard questions and those can include how we fix societal dysfunction and how we can be part of the solution in our own way as citizens. Asking these kinds of questions, holding our political leaders accountable, and focusing on the ‘why it happened?’ rather than the ‘how it happened?’ will help to cause some real change to happen and for these stories to become rarities in American society rather than sadly, all too common place, that we hear almost every day here.